A Spatial Reading of Three Films

Its October, which means its scary movie season! However, since being inspired by a recent paper delivered during the Geocriticism and Literary Cartography panel I co-organized at this year's SCMLA conference in San Antonio, I find I am applying a spatial lens to films that I usually don't consider critically. The paper read during the session was written by Dr. Dale Pattison of Texas A&M Corpus Christi, entitled, "The Violence of Gentrification in David Robert Mitchell's It Follows." It Follows is a gorgeous little art house/ indie horror flick, but Pattison's reading showed me that you don't have to be an RTF major, or even use traditional film terminology per se, to do a great cultural critical reading of a Hollywood feature. So, some title ideas for my own film readings would be:

1."The Other Space of Trauma in Jonathon Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Neil Gaiman's Coraline."

I am not sure how to make this title work with the film versions - or if I would be better off reading the novels. I think for Extremely Loud, a reading of the film would be best, the film's shots of ppl/spaces of New York are important in itself. These probably could be two separate papers, one taking the film and novel version of Foer's text, the other just a filmic analysis of Coraline? At any rate, JSF's narrative involves a boy searching for what his father calls "the sixth burrow" of New York. I read sixth burrow as an unseen "neighborhood" of trauma victims, an imaginary community of sorts. I consider it a heterotopic space, an other space that contests the "real" geospaces of the other "regular/real" burrows. It also shows how trauma creates spaces...spaces unseen...

2. "Other Space and the Violence of Unsustainability...in the Netflix Original Film 'The Apostle.'"

I don't even know about this title but with The Apostle, I think a great reading could be done on the fairly explicit ecological argument its making, but what would take the reading to the next level, I think, would be to examine the spatial element of the film, i.e. the fact that Erisden (if I remember correctly) is a "new world" sort of island. This could be just a thinly veiled allegory for America, but perhaps there is something here about a new/other space? There is mainly lots of violence to bodies, blood, oozy gooey stuff...blood bursting from mountains! Can this be something worthwhile to view with regard to concepts such as planetarity vs. globalisms? Maybe. I also think a discussion of this new medium of Netflix original content as a new space is interesting too.